Korean horror

China should not enable a regime that has carried out such unspeakable atrocities.

Copyright 2014: Houston Chronicle

Updated 2:28 pm, Saturday, February 22, 2014

Photo: Lee Jin-man, STF

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Anti-North Korea protesters shout slogans during an anti-North Korea rally on what is believed to be the birthday of North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2014. More than 100 anti-North Korea protesters and North Korean defectors attended the rally denouncing the North's human rights record and nuclear tests. The poster reads "North Korea's nuclear facilities, Immediately remove." (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man) less

Anti-North Korea protesters shout slogans during an anti-North Korea rally on what is believed to be the birthday of North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2014. More than ... more

Photo: Lee Jin-man, STF

Korean horror

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The report issued last week by the United Nations on human rights abuses in North Korea is a grisly read. Its documentation of torture, sexual assaults, infanticide, Orwellian mind control and a host of other gross injustices is so extreme it almost could be mistaken for a script from some futuristic apocalyptic movie. Tragically, however, the accounts are of real people, who have suffered, and continue to do so, under the most brutal, capriciously violent regime in the world.

North Korea is an unsustainable state. It consistently is unable to produce enough food to feed itself and is now virtually isolated from the rest of the world community, save China. Almost all of North Korea's trade is with its neighbor to the north. Without Sino support, the North Korean regime would collapse.

The U.N. report also was critical of China and suggested it might be implicated directly in some of the abuses by returning those who had fled from North Korean oppression. China opposed the creation of the inquiry in the first instance and has reacted negatively to the report.

It is easy to criticize the Chinese for their ongoing support of a regime that appears to be a reincarnation of Nazi Germany. However, China is a complex country whose foreign policy is informed by centuries of conflicts with its neighbors. Beijing sees a divided Korean peninsula in the best interest of China. China is certainly not the first country to support oppressive regimes. Even our own country has a less than stellar record in that regard with our experiences in places such as Iran, Iraq and Nicaragua.

But there are two differences that should persuade China it is time to begin pushing for change in North Korea. First is the extremity documented by the report. The abuses inflicted by the North Korean regime on their citizens are revolting. Some of the practices chronicled in the report are inducing abortions in pregnant women by kicking them in the abdomen until they miscarried, forcing women to drown their own children in mud holes, starving prisoners to death and institutional rape.

The second difference is the Age of Connectivity. There was a time when we would have been ignorant about such abuses. Horrific acts would have been hidden from the world, and therefore, would be ignored. But in the age of social media, satellite telephones and internet television, those times are long gone. The world, thankfully, has become an infinitely more transparent place, where such abuses will be held up for people everywhere to see.

China is obsessed with returning to what it sees as its rightful and historic place on the world stage. But it will never do so while enabling a regime like North Korea to carry out these unspeakable atrocities.

The fact that the world sat by and did nothing as Nazi Germany conducted genocide and all manner of other evil is a blot on the world's conscience that will never be erased. The world was complacent then. It cannot be now.

It is particularly incumbent on China to immediately change course, renounce North Korea and rid the world of this scourge.